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  • The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism by Haruko Wakabayashi
  • Elizabeth Horton Sharf (bio)
The Seven Tengu Scrolls: Evil and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. By Haruko Wakabayashi. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2012. xx, 203 pages. $50.00.

It takes time to unroll an illustrated handscroll that is more than a few feet long. To view the full set known as the Seven Tengu Scrolls (Shichi tengu-e; also known as the Tengu zōshi) is no small task. Each scroll is roughly a foot high and ranges in length from about 17 to 50 feet. Every scroll must be taken out of its box and unrolled section by section, the lengthy text perused, and the continuous painted scenes that follow the text inspected by the viewer; then, each scroll must be rerolled back to the beginning and put away. But even after such a painstaking review, the modern viewer will be at a loss to answer the big questions: Who authored or brushed the text? Who commissioned or painted the illustrations? With whom were the scrolls shared? For what purpose were they made? How long were they in circulation? And, an odd question perhaps, why do they take the form of narrative picture scrolls?

Haruko Wakabayashi, in her book The Seven Tengu Scrolls, gives us an exhaustive guide to reading the text and its imagery. To judge from their many similarities, the seven scrolls originated as a set. But they are now separated: four are in the Tokyo National Museum, two are in private collections, and one is in the Nezu Museum in Tokyo.1 Wakabayashi reunites them in principle; she peels off the many colorful associations that later accrue to the tengu image and fills out our view of all things tengu leading up to, and beyond, the scrolls’ creation in 1296. Via innumerable medieval literary and visual sources, she transports us to the late thirteenth century. With the benefit of relatively recent exciting discoveries of related texts and paintings by her Japanese colleagues, Wakabayashi has examined the group of surviving scrolls in depth. She uncovers their original sequence in the set, offers a new theory of authorship, and suggests ways to think about the relationship between the extant scrolls, relevant copies, and possible common sources, now lost. Moreover, she has come up with an interpretation of their meaning and function that is comprehensive (something lacking before) and relatively new. The tengu, a hybrid being of ambiguous ontological [End Page 151] status—natural and supernatural, normal and paranormal—turns out to be an ingenious vehicle for urging the reform of centuries-old medieval Japanese Buddhist establishments from within. It is also an entertaining instrument for critiquing rival new schools of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism from without.

The pictorial figure of the tengu is typically a clumsy amalgam of human and avian physical characteristics. Tengu are often depicted as humans with beaks, or as creatures with prominent wings and claws but with human torsos and limbs, or as birds wearing clothing or armor. They are also sometimes simply depicted in naturalistic human form, or in naturalistic bird form. Although they have their own realm of rebirth, tengu are closely associated with crows, or birds of prey such as the kite and kestrel, and the animal realm to which all birds, in Buddhist rebirth discourse, belong. There is a lot of variety to their depiction: warrior-monk tengu, abbot-tengu, plain monk-tengu, costumed bird-tengu, crow-tengu, kite-tengu, and so on. It is difficult to assess precisely what any one approach to depicting a tengu might have meant to the contemporary viewer. But one thing is certain: the tengu is generally an unwholesome figure. (Some tengu in stories have felt most at home near privies.)

Wakabayashi classifies tengu that appear in the scrolls by rank and by ethical behavior: there are elite tengu and menial tengu; there are relatively good tengu and relatively bad tengu (this distinction is found in at least one contemporary text, the Shasekishū); and there are unspecified degrees of tengu-ship in between. But above all, the motif is...

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